Hillary Clinton’s challenge: Her relationship with President Obama

In private meetings and public statements ahead of her book’s publication, Hillary Clinton and her allies have presented a united front with President Barack Obama, highlighting their transition from campaign rivals to Cabinet confidants.

Yet in the weeks before her memoir, “Hard Choices,” hits the shelves, news accounts have detailed instances of substantive foreign policy disagreements between the two while she was secretary of state – from the Russian reset to Syria to the U.S. embargo against Cuba.

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Clinton’s relationship with Obama presents a delicate challenge for the former secretary of state as she rolls out her book this week and potentially a presidential campaign months from now. She does not want to appear disloyal to her former boss but could use some separation given his anemic poll numbers. She’d have to have Obama supporters enthusiastically on board a presidential campaign, while fending off Republican attempts to depict her as representing a third Obama term.

Her allies dismiss as simplistic the prism through which Clinton is seen as either with Obama or against him, but Republicans are already seizing on any ray of daylight between them, which further complicates her challenge.

“Her record is our record,” former National Security Council and Obama adviser Tommy Vietor, who has joined Clinton’s team to handle response to her book, told Democrats at a recent briefing in Washington.

In her book — a manuscript of which was sent to the White House for review before it was printed, two sources told POLITICO — Clinton writes about some of the foreign policy debates in which she differed with the president, from whether to arm Syrian opposition rebels to whether Egyptian leader Hosni Mubarak should leave office quickly amid the Arab Spring protests.

Foreign policy is not typically an issue at the forefront of voters’ minds in presidential races, but that may be different if there’s a former secretary of state on the ballot.

To that end, describing her often hawkish approach to foreign policy at State is less about Clinton positioning herself as strong – polls show voters believe she is – than it is about not getting dragged down by a president who, according to public opinion surveys, is increasingly seen as ineffective.

“Obama’s taken a lot of hits on foreign policy. He’s not seen as a [strong] leader,” said Ian Bremmer, a foreign policy expert and president of the nonpartisan Eurasia Institute.

Clinton allies insist they aren’t trying to have it both ways by creating competing narratives. The majority of the time Obama and Clinton were in sync, they said – and to the extent there were differences it was because the president created an atmosphere in which advisers could offer differing opinions that he would weigh before he made up his mind.

“That’s part of the tension of running to succeed a president — you’ve served in that administration, you have to display that there’s a track record there but also you’ll be your own person,” said Lawrence Korb, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress.

A prime example was a recent Wall Street Journal article that revealed that Clinton, as she was getting ready to depart Foggy Bottom, wrote Obama a memo that the attempted “reset” in the relationship with Russia had crumbled and should be abandoned. Obama stayed with it for many months, only fully abandoning the effort when Russia invaded Crimea.

The memo is significant because Clinton became the face of the “reset” policy, and took the most heat after a botched effort at handing a Russian official an actual button that was supposed to say “reset” but had been translated to a different word. In her book, Clinton reportedly writes that it wasn’t a great day for U.S. “linguistic” skills.

One former State Department official told POLITICO, “The president wanted a Cabinet that had vigorously debated the issues in front of him and [to] hear all the arguments and that’s what he got and I think it would be strange to do it any other way.”

Still, Republicans have seized on breaks between Clinton and Obama on foreign policy to try to create a wedge between them.

In the early discussions of a possible trade of prisoners with the Taliban to release captive Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, The Daily Beast reported last week in a story based on information from former State Department officials, Clinton had been skeptical of a trade for the soldier and wanted to do it only under very strict conditions.

Obama has come under intense criticism from Republicans for trading terror suspects in exchange for a soldier who’s been called a deserter. Democrats have offered a less than robust defense of the president.

Clinton’s concerns about a potential prisoner swap had been reported previously by Michael Hastings in Rolling Stone magazine in 2012, although without the same level of detail.

Nick Merrill, a Clinton spokesman, said the idea that Clinton “ever rejected a transfer like this out of hand is not accurate. In fact, she authorized negotiations with the Taliban that included a transfer for Sgt. Bergdahl.”